Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, May 20, 2003

Carol Klingel had to chuckle. The New York Times was reporting -- on the front page, no less -- that her son, a Marine scout who had been wounded in Iraq, struggled with flashbacks, "his mind wandering from images of his girlfriend back in Ohio to the sight of an exploding fireball."

The story was wrenching. It was also wrong. For starters, Lance Cpl. James Klingel didn't have a girlfriend. He had broken up with his most recent sweetheart before he was deployed to the Persian Gulf.

"We were laughing about it. I kept asking him, which girl would be thinking that she was the girl mentioned in the story?" his mom said.

The Klingels knew that reporter Jayson Blair had gotten the facts wrong. But they didn't call the New York Times to complain. They didn't write to demand a correction.

In a telling sign of how little Americans trust the press, many of the people Blair wrote falsely about over the past seven months shrugged off his mistakes as just another example of sloppy, melodramatic reporting.

Some protested strenuously, demanding corrections, only to give up in frustration. Others never knew about the errors because they did not read the articles that put their voices in front of millions of newspaper readers across the nation.

For the Klingels and others like them, however, the embellishments -- and even the outright fiction -- they saw in Blair's work seemed hardly worth squawking about. It was more or less what they anticipated.

"You expect people are going to get misquoted, or quoted out of context," said Carol Klingel, a high school art teacher.

Blair's article wrongly described her son as permanently disabled from his combat injuries. It exaggerated his emotional distress. And it attributed comments to the wounded Marine that he did not remember making -- including the dramatic ending to the story, which quoted Klingel as saying he was still looking over his shoulder, worried "about who might come shooting at me out of the bush."

Her son was upset, Carol Klingel recalled. But she figured that the story "wasn't all that wrong" -- nothing "earth-shatteringly false," as she put it --

Except for a brief surge of support for reporters after the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes, "positive evaluations of news organizations on issues like trust, credibility and arrogance have all been declining steadily" for more than a decade, said Carroll Doherty, editor of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press.

Just 21 percent of Americans believe all or most of what they read in their local papers, according to a poll last year by the Pew Center. In another survey, the center found that 45 percent believe news stories are "often inaccurate."

Americans also recognize the power of the press. And power is intimidating.

When Robert Horan, the chief prosecutor in Fairfax County, Va., held a news conference last year to denounce one of Blair's articles on the sniper shootings as "dead wrong," he stepped to the microphone with a sense of wariness.

"My opening line to the press conference was that I was doing this against my better judgment, because you should never take on anyone who buys ink by the gallon," Horan said.

Because he did not want to discuss evidence in public, Horan refused to disclose -- even to Blair's editors -- exactly which parts of the article were inaccurate. The New York Times stood by its story.

Horan did not bother to complain the next time Blair wrote about "evidence" that Horan knew did not exist.

"An outfit like the New York Times carries almost an aura of being the gospel," he said.

A few months earlier, Pete Mahoney, the associate athletic director at Kent State University, had come to a similar conclusion.

Mahoney was furious about a Blair article that said Kent State was scrambling to meet NCAA standards for football-game attendance with the dubious tactic of sponsoring tailgate parties -- and counting everyone in the parking lot as "in attendance." Blair quoted Mahoney as saying: "We are going to try it until someone tells us to stop."

The trouble was, Blair had never talked with Mahoney. They had exchanged voice mails, but that was all. "How can you make up that stuff? He was setting me up for a punch in the belly," Mahoney said.

But he did not want to tangle with the New York Times by demanding a retraction.

A New York Times spokesman said last week that the paper is investigating that incident and has established a committee to review its policy for taking complaints and printing corrections.

The truth is, though, that many of Blair's most misleading stories did not generate complaints.

An article about Pfc. Jessica Lynch, for instance, described family friends Donald and Glenda Nelson sitting at their kitchen table reading a letter the young soldier had written before she was taken captive in Iraq. The scene was entirely invented -- or else, stolen from another source. But the Nelsons did not request a retraction. They didn't even know the New York Times had printed the story.

"I never interviewed with the New York Times, so why would I be looking through it?" said Donald Nelson, a coal miner.

Federal officials who do read the New York Times regularly noted some gross inaccuracies in Blair's sniper coverage. The U.S. Attorney in Maryland fired off a letter of protest.

But Barbara Comstock, the director of public affairs for the U.S. Justice Department, never followed up with calls to Blair's editors -- or demands for corrections. She focused her energy instead on making sure other reporters covering the story got it right.

"I felt if they were going to be stupid enough to put someone this unprofessional on the beat, that's not my problem," Comstock said.

Others who appeared in Blair's stories praised his work, even as they noted a few oddities.

Michael and Martha Gardner spoke with Blair several times by phone for a story about the anguish of waiting for news of their son, a Marine scout serving in Iraq. The reporter apparently never left New York, but he wrote the story as though he had spent a day with the Gardners in Hunt Valley, Md.; he described what they ate, how they gestured, how they reacted as they watched the TV news. (He also misspelled their daughter's name.)

In south Texas, San Juanita Anguiano, the mother of the last soldier missing in action in Iraq, also found herself grateful for Blair's fraudulent coverage. She did not know, until the New York Times contacted her recently, that he had written a front-page story about her -- without interviewing her --

by lifting passages from the San Antonio Express-News.

The bold plagiarism in that article caught the attention of the Express- News, and the editor complained to the New York Times, touching off the inquiry that led to Blair's resignation.